Decent housing is a fundamental human need, and how to address that need is an issue that has bedeviled not only the United States but every developed nation, for the past hundred years or more. In the United States, while there had been some limited federal engagement with housing policy during the early part of the 20th century, it was during the New Deal era that the federal government clearly placed its stamp on American housing issues, with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration, the public housing program, and more.3 Finally, in the Housing Act of 1949, Congress set forth the goal that every American family should have a “decent home and a suitable living environment.” While the fact that that enactment included authorization for the urban renewal program, which arguably did more to hinder than further that objective, can be seen as a painful irony4, the fact remains that that goal has remained the foundation for housing policy in the United States ever since 1949.5 As a nation, the United States has made progress toward improving housing conditions since then in many different respects, but as it has done so, new challenges have emerged.

The purpose of this paper is to outline some of the most critical of those challenges, explore how they can be addressed and in the process try to bring the 1949 pledge closer to reality. Today’s housing crises are fundamentally economic in nature, as I will discuss below. They are affected and distorted by legal inequities and the failure of the political system to address them responsibly or effectively, but they remain fundamentally economic. As such, housing cannot be separated from the larger economic challenges facing our nation, in particular the dearth of well-paying jobs, the growth in economic inequality, and with that growth, the economic marginalization of a growing share of America’s families and individuals.